The cryptocurrency space is known for being many things, the beacon of financial freedom, the innovation hub for the dichotomy of finance and technology, and the developer’s paradise, but due to the polarising natures of camps, toxicity between and within networks is rampant. Gavin Wood, the co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum stated the same.

In a recent report by Longhash, Wood lamented that the aforementioned ideals of the cryptocurrency community have not been lived up to, in certain cases. Given the extreme and maximalist nature of various cryptocurrencies and ecosystems, the space, according to Wood, has become increasingly “toxic”.

He stated:

“It’s very nationalistic, maximalistic, whatever you want to call it. There are tribes, and there are people who can no longer look at the technical aspects, and they just put their flag in the sand and it’s now it’s almost turned into a religion.”

During the early days of the Ethereum project, his team was dismissed as a “waste of time and effort”, by the Bitcoin adherents, and now “Ethereum maximalists” are exhibiting the same opposition with other upcoming camps.

In light of this, the former Ethereum executive stated:

“There are people who are now refusing to accept that there are may be good, solid technical reasons why you may want chains beyond Ethereum”

Venturing out of Ethereum and starting Polkadot, a blockchain communicator of sorts, Wood describes his new project as a “NATO for blockchains”.

Despite the overarching goal of any decentralized currency project being decentralization, Wood concedes that this principle is a myth. Even the top cryptocurrency, Bitcoin [BTC], in his opinion is controlled by a small group of people. He stated:

“Anyone with what they call push access, basically the ability to change the Bitcoin core repository, is in charge of Bitcoin.”

The top altcoin and his former project aren’t free from centralization either. Ethereum is under the control of the Ethereum Foundation, holding the Ethereum trademark, and hence the foundation can wield this power against the community during upgrade oppositions, he opined. The sole reason for calling the Ethereum network “decentralized” is because Vitalik Buterin, another co-creator, “isn’t a dictator”.

Decentralization, in addition to being mythical in the cryptocurrency space, is overrated, stated Wood. He added:

“There’s no such thing as true decentralization without some degree of staleness or inertia.”

Interestingly, Wood is not the only ex-CTO of one of the largest “decentralized” networks to hit back at his previous ecosystem questioning the centrality of control and launch his own project. On May 10, Lucien Chen, the ex-CTO of TRON departed from the network launching his own project “Volume Network” and bluntly stating “TRON is no longer decentralized”.